Recently, people started reporting that bibliographic data (e.g. citation information) is missing from the OPS family request.
David Reymond of Patent2Net fame [1] already reported this issue and it also had an impact on PatZilla [2] as well.
[1] GitHub - Patent2net/P2N-v3: Last version workong on...
[2] GitHub - ip-tools/ip-navigator: A modular patent information research platform and data integration toolkit with a modern user interface and access to multiple data sources.
David found that only POST requests made through [1] would fail while GET requests like [2] would still succeed. David believes this issue started popping up in late summer 2019. Thanks for investigating!
On the other hand, we have not been able to find any related information on the EPO forum section about OPS [3]. The closest thing might be [4], but it is not quite the issue we are looking at here.
[1] GitHub - 55minutes/python-epo-ops-client: Python Client for the European Patent Office's Open Patent Services API
[2] http://ops.epo.org/rest-services/family/publication/docdb/EP.1000000.A1/biblio
[3] Open Patent Services (OPS) and bulk data subscription products - EPO - Discussion forums
[4] Unable to use POST request to get family Bulk data of (biblio, legal) services in a single request - EPO - Discussion forums
David already preliminarily fixed it for Patent2Net the other day with Using Get method for family client · Patent2net/python-epo-ops-client@1b4eb25 · GitHub.
We just submitted this issue to the upstream author of the software library we are using for accessing OPS.
We just submitted a pull request to the epo-ops-client library.
George Song just merged our changes and released python-epo-ops-client 3.1.1 on PyPI.
Thank you so much!